Competition and Cooperation

Competition and cooperation are often described as opposites, with cooperation favored as “social” and competition scorned as “anti-social.” This contrast is made in utter ignorance of economics.

The economic system of a capitalist society is a system of division-of-labor. In this system, each individual devotes his labor to the production of goods and services that are consumed by others, while what he consumes is produced by others.

This represents voluntary social cooperation of the most intensive and extensive kind imaginable—a cooperation of hundreds of millions, indeed, of billions of people all across the world in serving one another’s needs and wants.

Economic competition is nothing other than the process of organizing this social cooperation. It determines which individuals produce which goods, by what methods, and to what extent.

For a complete elaboration of the nature and effects of economic competition, see my CAPITALISM: A TREATISE ON ECONOMICS, available in hardcover, 2-volume paperback, and Kindle editions at https://amzn.to/3kd4y39

There you can learn, for example, why there is room for all in the competition of capitalism, how people of lesser ability are enabled to outcompete people of greater ability, and how its effects are the opposite of competition in the animal kingdom.

Preventing Low-Skilled Workers from Competing: a $15 Minimum Wage

The campaign for a $15 minimum wage has been in and out of the news over the last few months. It will almost certainly be back in the news again before very long. What follows is a brief analysis of the consequences of enacting such a minimum wage, one which is far above the prevailing market wages of millions of workers.

The efforts underway by the Service Employees International Union, and its political and media allies, to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour would, if successful, cause major unemployment among low-skilled workers, who are the prospective alleged beneficiaries of those efforts.

The reason is not only the fact that higher wages serve to raise costs of production and thus prices, which in turn serves to reduce physical sales volume and thus the number of workers needed. There is also another, equally, if not more important reason in this case, a reason which is only very inadequately indicated by reference to the substitution of machinery or automation for the direct labor of workers when wages are increased.

This is the fact that a low wage constitutes a competitive advantage for less capable workers that serves to protect them from competition from more capable workers. A wage of $7.25 per hour for fast-food workers, for example, serves to protect those workers from competition for their jobs from workers able to earn $8-$15 per hour in other lines of work. The workers able to earn these higher wage rates are not interested in seeking employment at the lower wage rates of the fast-food workers.

But if the wage of the fast-food workers, and all other workers presently earning less than $15 per hour, is raised to $15 per hour, then these more capable workers can now earn as much as fast-food workers as they can in any of the occupations in which they had been working up to now .

Moreover, the widespread rise in wage rates to $15 per hour will cause unemployment in all of the occupations affected. The unemployed clerks, telemarketers, factory workers, and whoever, who otherwise would have earned between $8 and $15 per hour, will have no reason not to apply for work in fast food, which will now pay as much as any other occupation that is open to them. And since those workers are more capable, it is overwhelmingly likely that to the extent that they do seek employment as fast-food workers, they will be preferred over the low-skilled workers who presently work in fast-food establishments. Thus, the rise in the wage of the fast-food workers will serve as an invitation to the competition of large numbers of workers who do not presently think of working as fast-food workers and who, being better qualified, will almost certainly take away their jobs.

Between less employment overall in the least-skilled lines of work such as fast food, and the incentive created for vastly increased competition for employment in those lines coming from more qualified workers, the effect could well be to close those lines altogether to the employment of workers at the low end of skill and ability. That, of course, would deprive these people of the opportunity to acquire skills and abilities from work experience that otherwise would have enabled them to become capable of performing more demanding jobs later on.

What the demand for a $15 an hour minimum wage represents is a case of low-skilled workers being led to reach for a high-wage “bird in the bush,” so to speak. Unfortunately, at the high wage, there are both fewer birds in the bush than are presently in hand and most or all of them will fly away into the hands of others, who possess greater skills and abilities, if the attempt is made to reach for them.

This must ultimately be the result even if somehow, the present fast-food workers and the like could be enabled to keep their jobs for a time. Even so, practically every time that it became a question of hiring someone new, the new employees would almost certainly be drawn from the ranks of workers of greater skill and ability than those who had customarily been employed in these jobs. Thus, even if not immediately, in time there would simply be no more room in the economic system for workers at or near the bottom of the skills ladder.

No one can question the desirability of being able to earn $15 an hour rather than $7.25 an hour. Still more desirable would be the ability to earn $50 an hour instead of $15 an hour. However, it is necessary to know considerably more than this about economics before attempting to enact sweeping changes in economic policy, changes to be achieved by attempting to organize a mass movement that is based on nothing but a desire for economic improvement and no real knowledge whatever of how actually to achieve it.

George Reisman, Ph.D., is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics and the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. His website is www.capitalism.net. Follow him on Twitter at @GGReisman.